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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

blog.florianherrengt.com

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Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#411

Post by lnrd »

logicchains wrote: post #392
lnrd wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not a scapegoat, it's basic economics that wages are determined by supply and demand; increasing the supply decreases wages. It's also basic economics that this ultimately reduces costs to consumers, but that doesn't make it any less painful for the workers whose wages face downward pressure due to increased competition from labor force growth.

Never heard the words "basic economics" used outside of strawman political arguments. To think that H-1B developers can meaningfully shift the supply to the point that is felt by other people it's very shortsighted. The job market has been very difficult for years with vastly more supply than demand and its due to plenty economic, financial and political reasons. Interest rates itself affect it way more than any H-1B developer could ever do it. If you were to actually sit down and look deeply into it and look at the data, I'm sure that H-1B would be a small percentage of the problem and you would get fired up about so many other things.

But that's difficult and time consuming, if anything it's advanced economics and requires effort to decode what's happening. What it's very easy to do is getting angry at a group of people and to feel deep unfairness about it, then think that if that group of people were to leave, the problem would improve or be solved. That's exactly the kind of thought that seems to be so pervasive at all levels and yes, it is a scapegoat. Especially since that the only merit someone has over H-1B is to (by pure chance) having being born in a different place. I really feel that many people complaining against H-1B wouldn't even qualify for it if they were born somewhere else.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#412

Post by pjmlp »

andriy_koval wrote: post #351
pjmlp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center. There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.

it could mean they are not completely out of automation opportunities, and will lose to more innovative players if won't invest into software. The end state of these companies is grid of cheap robots controlled by software.

Exactly, because the amount of people on bench due to robots doesn't scale with the amount of customer opportunities.

There are only so much customers to chose from and all of them have finite budgets.

The exponential growth curve only exists in MBA books.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#413

Post by jasode »

sublinear wrote: post #390
jasode wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice. >What tends to happen is that the EMs and PMs look at who’s free and give that person the task. The gp you replied to qualified it with "enterprise software" (LOB, CRUD, etc aka "cost center") so your observations where senior -vs- junior engineers being more fungible can…

> There's also a spectrum of hard-to-easy in enterprise software but it's much more narrow than engineering code bases. I'm not going to bang this drum too much, because it's been done to death for well over a decade, but lines-of-business supported by CRUD apps are rarely simple from an engineering perspective. Much of that engineering is in the decisions made outside the codebase, or spread across multiple codebase…

>, but lines-of-business supported by CRUD apps are rarely simple from an engineering perspective.

You misread my comment as some dig at CRUD LOB enterprise coders. I used to work on enterprise ERP code with 20000+ tables. Yes, I agree it definitely wasn't simple.

Instead, I was responding to a very specific observation the gp made: he saw that both senior and junior devs were interchangeable when randomly assigning the next JIRA ticket.

That can only happen in a situation where the JIRA tickets are similar enough in complexity that the difference in skills between your senior and junior devs are irrelevant when the work is assigned.

Maybe some enterprise software teams can work like that. However, none of the engineering-heavy type of codebases can treat seniors and juniors interchangeably.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#414

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

overgard wrote: post #375
Syntaf wrote: post #35

> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…

I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…

The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship period and follow on licensure exams.

And more directly, I believe good software engineering is really hard. I think it takes a certain mindset to begin with that many people just do not and will never possess, and it takes years of experience to get a good sense of what works and what doesn't, especially with respect to the entire relationship between code, business, people and teams. Yet we constantly see all this devaluation of the practice of software engineering ("code was always the easy part" - bull-fucking-shit), often times by our own practitioners of the craft.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#415

Post by andriy_koval »

pjmlp wrote: post #412
andriy_koval wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it could mean they are not completely out of automation opportunities, and will lose to more innovative players if won't invest into software. The end state of these companies is grid of cheap robots controlled by software.

Exactly, because the amount of people on bench due to robots doesn't scale with the amount of customer opportunities. There are only so much customers to chose from and all of them have finite budgets. The exponential growth curve only exists in MBA books.

In case of productivity surplus, exponential demand can be easily created by government: e.g. they print N trillions dollars, and say we spend it on some (hopefully useful) mega project(s): fusion, carbon capture, give nice home to everyone, fully verifiable, glitch free, hyper optimized software, etc. It will immediately create lots of demand, supply chains, customers, etc.

You can see current AI hype as example, and its government didn't step in and printed N trillions yet.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#416

Post by florianherrengt »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #68
Syntaf wrote: post #35

> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…

Maybe those engineers that don't care about making their solution _good_ are actually the good engineers, have you ever thought about that??? There are exceptions where quality really matters but most software shops build CRUD web apps where it's not really a good characteristic to obsess over the cleanest and most elegant details, instead you need to get the stuff the customer wants done! I for one tend to care less…

I tend to find that this perspective comes from people working on relatively small or isolated projects.

On a large system, the customer being happy today isn’t enough. You need other engineers to be able to understand the system.

Have you ever been on call and been woken up in the middle of the night to fix a production incident in a system you didn’t write?

If everything you build is small, isolated and easy to replace (basically fire-and-forget), then yeah... who cares? Ship the ugly thing, get paid and move on.

If you’re going to be working on something for the next 5+ years, you should definitely spend some time thinking about what you’re doing.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#417

Post by liendolucas »

I have witnessed first hand this and must say is a disaster, the person that came up with a fix to an issue that I didn't understand tried everything to convince me that the automated fix works.

Indeed the fix did work, but when I asked him to explain me the problem and the fix he started to use the prompt to get answers.

At that point I just let it go, the only thing that I mentioned later on is that I'm ok with pushing that to prod if that was ordered to me but I'm not responsible for it.

I prefer to keep the bug live until I fully understand the problem, reproduce it, come up with a solution and maybe just maybe perform a check against what a computer generated.

Please note that the bug came from a real human code base but being complex and not familiar with that part of the code (moreover the code was handed to us without any type of support/documentation) rendered me in a weak position where I couldn't come up with a solution so far.

How can someone trust so much a computer generated hotfix without fully understanding a problem is what still baffles me.

Still resisting to use any aided coding, no LLM is not going to steal the capacity to use my brain. The day I'm forced to used these tools, the day I quit.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#418

Post by lookACamel »

From the title I thought this post would be about something completely different. The post is about splitting the world into "good" and "bad" engineers with an emphasis on the bad engineer. Ok but what does that have to do with the middle class? The post leaves the best part out.

What I thought the post would be about is the dissolution of the White Collar Kitchen Brigade The kitchen is run by the Chef but it needs the Sous Chef, Line Cooks, Kitchen Hands to operate.

Many software engineers have made a good living acting as the sous chefs and line cooks underneath the rockstar chefs, but with AI companies are inclined to turn the whole kitchen over to the top dog and their AI crew and the ordinary human crew is slowly being churned out.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#419

Post by wwweston »

phil21 wrote: post #386
overgard wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…

Or it’s just the largely self-taught intrinsically curious autodidact developers and engineers have always been 10x and the “average” person in it for the paycheck is really what a 1xer has always actually been. I think the industry highly skewed towards the former back in the 90s (and earlier!) when I first entered it. There certainly were vast differences between the best and the worst, but nothing like the giganti…

I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system.

And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#420

Post by Oras »

Agree with the article, but good luck convincing upper management about it.

“If it works, don’t fix it” until it doesn’t and we shall see a new wave of software hiring in a year or two.

Every enterprise is talking about AI Transformation, and that great with the right expectations. But those who think AI will just make platforms quick with less people and least experienced engineers, will have to prepare for the deinshitification transformation in a year or two.

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